Unpretentious movie reviews you can read in less than 10 minutes

Prometheus is no doubt visually impressive, but its too vague and purposely made to launch a franchise.

It’s beautiful and perfectly other-worldly. There are sweeping panoramas of earthly and non-earthly landscapes and grand sci-fi set pieces.

The film opens with David, a lifelike android with sinister motivations played by Micheal Fassbender. He watches over a crew sleeping in pods while another badly named ship in the sci-fi movieverse, Prometheus, makes it way to their destination.

When they finally get there the first one to wake-up is Vickers, a stone cold Charlize Theron who’s playing another villain since her stint as an evil Queen in Show White and The Huntsman. The rest of the forgettable crew (with a token Asian hanging in the background) are woken up. It turns out that a corporation has funded an expedition based on a theory.

According to two archeologists (Charlie Holloway played by Logan Marshall Green and Elizabeth Shaw played by Noomi Rapace), a superior race left a message through a depiction of disks in ancient drawings. While Holloway thinks its a map, Shaw thinks its an invitation. But both agree that it may hold the key to the origins of humankind.

When the ship finally lands at some distant planet, the crew explores and eventually discovers something while the movie builds up on the suspense and tension. But what was originally a crafted mythology that asked interesting philosophical questions soon got buried under a pile of loose ends with twists and reversals. It’s natural to engage the audience and let them figure it out, but the writers of this movie has no clear intention of making any connectable dots.

Like other predictable horror stories, the action starts rolling when the characters suddenly lose their common sense. The second half of the movie turns into a creature feature with chases, fights and explosions. When everything clears up and the last human survivor emerges, the movie cops out and leaves the audiences plainly hanging, hinting at a sequel.

Overall there’s nothing much to take away from this film. It has the same plot line with “Alien” but with a more elaborate special effects. There’s only a handful of good performances (Fassbender, Theron, and Rapace). But you got to admit it is a visual spectacle worth the ticket.